This invention relates, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to facilitating the building and/or retargeting of architecture-dependent assets.
An asset is a building block of an application or it can be an application, itself. An asset may have dependencies on other assets, such as libraries, components, data, resources, etc. The building of an asset includes transforming the source code of the asset, which represents the logic of the asset, from a computer language into a binary executable form. An asset may be built for a particular architecture. For instance, it may be built for a specific hardware architecture and/or for specific software (e.g., operating system, versions of software libraries, etc.). When an asset is built for a particular architecture, it is an architecture-dependent asset.
An architecture-dependent asset can run on the architecture for which it was built, but not on a different architecture. Further, if the asset has dependencies, the dependencies may also need to be built for that architecture.
Often, assets are to be used by multiple users and applications. This is the backbone of component-based technologies. However, in order for an architecture-dependent asset to be executed on other architectures, it and its dependencies need to be retargeted for those other architectures. The retargeting includes building the asset on the other architectures, if necessary. The building and retargeting of assets are tedious manual processes.